by Anne Christensen
photos by Paul Myrow

hen Professor Paul Myrow talks about studying the geology of remote parts of northern India, it’s useful to remember that his standard of comparison is based on working in Antarctica, often considered the remotest place on Earth.

So here’s what Myrow means when he says “remote”: “We fly from London to Delhi to a city such as Leh. We rent Jeeps and drive for 10 days into the backcountry. At the end of the road, we get out of the car, hire a mule or donkey train, and walk two to four more days. We work about 10 days and start back. The donkeys carry all our gear and hundreds of pounds of rocks, which are sent by ship to Los Angeles. We put them on a freight train, then go back to our offices and wait for them to show up.”

Myrow has taken a Colorado College student on each of his north India trips, and will take another to Tibet this summer. Together, they research the paleogeography of the Himalayas as recorded in their Cambrian fossils. “We’re trying to reconstruct India’s position relative to Antarctica, Asia, and Africa about 500 million years ago,” he says. “We’re looking at ancient mountain-building events and trying to decipher what they mean – which tectonic plates are colliding with each other.”

Myrow is a sedimentologist and stratigrapher whose Ph.D. covered the fauna of the “Cambrian explosion” of life forms between the Precambrian and Cambrian periods in Newfoundland. “That’s the reference section for this time boundary, where they ‘hammered in a golden spike,’” he says. “When I collaborate with paleontologists, I provide the historical and environmental context for fossils.”

And collaborate he does – with colleagues around the world and with students in his classes. First-year students work as field assistants on his Rocky Mountain projects; more advanced students work in the lab, grinding rocks into powder for carbon and oxygen isotope analyses or slicing rocks into transparent slices for use with a petrographic microscope. After extensive interviews, he chooses a top student to accompany him on a summer field study in a remote area.

Collaboration Means Mentoring

“I think of it as using a grad school research model at the undergrad level,” says Myrow. “The students are active collaborators in the science – they’re generating data, preparing drafted figures, scanning photographs. Their theses become the templates for finished articles that appear in journals, and they are co-authors. Almost all of them present their results at regional and maybe national meetings of the Geological Society of America (GSA).

“In the field, we work side by side all day, collecting data, making measurements, describing structures, and I take the notes – as opposed to sending them out to do the work, letting them flail, visiting them once in a while, and ending up with work that’s not publishable. By the time they finish, they’re maybe 75 percent as capable of reading the rocks as I am.

“The quality of their work once they get back to campus is as good or better than most masters’ students, because we did all the field work together – and because our students are excellent students. At GSA meetings, when people find out they’re undergraduates, they’re stunned. Almost universally, they believe these students are finishing their masters’ theses, so our students get well-placed in graduate schools.”

Exhaustion Challenges Researchers

Karl Thompson ’01 accompanied Myrow to the Spiti Valley of north India in 2000 to measure and describe more than 1,300 meters of strata and the fossils therein. “We worked for 12 days straight, climbing higher each day, eventually to just under 16,000 feet,” Myrow recounts. “Our feet hurt from descending thousands of feet of scree slope each night to our base camp at 12,800 feet.

After many days hiking through the high, remote Zanskar Valley in northern India to research Cambrian fossils, Professor Paul Myrow and Katie Snell ’02 reconnoitered with the truck that would return them to civilization. Here, Snell soaks her blistered feet in an icy stream.

“We hit the limit of our exhaustion on the way home and nearly crawled the last half mile in the dark. It was the most physically difficult thing either of us had ever done, and it created a bond between us akin to survivors of a battle,” says Myrow. Thompson is now a geology graduate student at the University of California-Riverside; he and Myrow are finishing an article with Thompson as second author.